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• 1 media/gettyimages-494584561-612x612.jpg media/british women.jpg 2020-12-02T07:42:52-08:00 "Female Friendships" 31 Unpacking Dinah Mulock Craik's Ideas About Protestant Sisterhood image_header 2020-12-08T11:31:02-08:00 1858 51.5074° N, 0.1278° W mid-nineteenth century In her chapter “Female Friendships,” Craik guides women to cultivate friendships based on choice rather than necessity to create stable and honest forces that assist women in becoming more grounded individuals. She pays special attention to how women can nurture their emotional, financial, moral, and physical well-being through other women.  
  
  To Craik, friendship is, “A bond, not of nature but of choice, it should exist and be maintained calm, free, and clear, having neither rights nor jealousies; at once the firmest and most independent of all human ties” (Craik 132).
  
  Craik’s version of female community explores the ways in which shared work and shared faith is useful to cultivate support and self-dependence, not only for individual single women but for the collective community of women, including the reader.  Craik develops a narrative voice that encourages immediate personal self-development among women but also embraces the communitarian dimension of female Protestant sisterhood.  Her paradox between the individualistic and communitarian dimensions rests on to middle-class Protestant beliefs about the saving power of work.  As Sally Mitchell writes, Craik “promotes sisterhood through empathy” (Anna Stensen Newnum 313).
  
  Craik compares women’s friendships to love; both nurture unity with another person.  However, only friendship fosters a sense of self-identity independent from the other person.  Similar to one’s first love, first friendships are “one of the purest, most self-forgetful and self- denying attachments that the human heart can experience” (Craik 130).  Both are “sweet” whether “given or returned,” should “last forever,” and value the “sanctity of silence” (Craik 133, 142, 144).
  
  The distinction between them lies in the way friendships encourage liberation.  Indeed, according to Craik, they “must have an independent self-existence, capable of gradations and varieties” (Craik 139).  Craik depicted the inticate emotional experiences of single women in the mid-nineteenth century in attempt to normalize and support their estranged position in society.  Craik's paradoxical vision -- both individualist and communitarian -- embraced both young single women and the female community as a whole.
  
  
  In Victorian England, single (especially middle class) women were alienated by the upper class.  As a fellow single, Anglican, financially independent woman, Craik offers a solution the female struggle by relating to it, and acknowledging, as Elaine Showalter writes, “while women could not depend on men to give them homes to support them, they could rely on each other” (Showalter 14).  Newnum describes Craik’s intentions for writing about sisterhoods as providing “single women with opportunities for work and an outlet for their affections, which for her are the most important merits of any female community” (Newnum 309). By inserting herself into the conversation and in relation to the reader, she balances the specific individual dimension with her call for a collective transformation in women’s empowerment.
  
  How does Craik’s upbringing and religious identity influence her writing and reception?
  
  While her father served as preacher in a small nonconformist Primitive Methodist congregation, Craik identified herself as Anglican and highlighted the need for inclusivity within the Church. Stenson describes her attempt to create a “version of female community that would be acceptable outside of High Church circles by appealing to the middle-class, Protestant belief in the saving power of work” (Craik 309). 
  
  Although Craik pioneers this "feminist" approach that asks women to empower other women, Craik upholds many patriarchal and heteronormative conceptions in the text regarding love and male friendships.  In fact, throughout her life, she defended the essential differences between men and women.  In the chapter, she reveals her own misogynistic undertones by admitting men are better at keeping secrets and forming stronger bonds.  
  
  Ultimately, Craik's version of the female community delicately balances between an individualistic call for self-improvement and an urgent affirmation of Protestant sisterhood.
  
   
• 1 media/Dinah_Maria_Craik_(née_Mulock)_by_Sir_Hubert_von_Herkomer.jpg 2020-12-01T13:20:21-08:00 Dinah Mulock Craik 30 Introduction to A Woman's Thoughts About Women by Dinah Mulock Craik image_header 2020-12-10T14:53:23-08:00 1858 53.0027° N, 2.1794° W mid-nineteenth century

  Dinah Maria Mulock Craik was born on April 20, 1826 in Stoke-on-Trent, England. The daughter of a school teacher and Primitive Methodist preacher, Craik was fortunate to receive an education at the Brampton House Academy, a day school near her home in Newcastle-under-Lyme.  Although her family was middle class, Craik reached out to family members and booksellers to gain access to books by Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, and Sir Walter Scott and took interest in reading. At the age of 19, her mother died, and quickly thereafter, her father abandoned her and her two brothers, leaving Craik to fend for themselves financially. And so, Craik took up writing to make money. Her brothers died soon after (Sally Mitchell).

  However, Craik did not take up authorship as a profession simply out of necessity.  In fact, she writes in A Woman’s Thoughts About Women that she chose to become a writer because it was the only profession where women competed with men “on a level ground — and . . . often beat them in their own field” (Chapter 3).
  
  Originally published in London in 1858 during the Victorian era, A Woman’s Thoughts About Women is a self-help book written by female author Dinah Maria Mulock Craik. She discusses various aspects of life for middle class British women, ranging from education and self-dependence to female friendships and growing old. 

  We are researching a specific copy of the book held by the Santa Clara University archives. It is not an initial copy published in London, but rather an American edition that was published by Follett, Foster & Company in 1858 in Columbus, Ohio. The introduction to this book is written by Reverend Anson Smyth, who was an Ohio State School Commissioner. The introduction conveys Rev. Smyth’s negative opinions towards American women of the mid-19th century and his belief that they are lazy and should read Craik's book in order to improve their character, work ethic, and overall demeanor.
  
  Upon discovering that this copy is actually intended for an American audience, our group questioned why this introduction was written by a religious man for an American audience compared to the original British copy that had no introduction. We generated questions to think about in terms of gender critique, such as if there needed to be an introduction written by a man to assert some validity for Craik as a female author to an American audience. If Craik didn’t need an introduction in her book by a man to be heavily circulated and read in London, why was there an introduction included in the U.S. version? 
  
  

  We raise more questions like these ones within our research that call attention to the power of Craik’s work to assert its own value and validity. We think this aspect of continual questioning is significant when thinking about our anthology project as a whole and how we as a class seek to recover works by feminine authors in order to depict how their work contributes to feminist recovery and gender critique.
  
  Overall, our anthology project is grounded in and guided by questions. We decided to include questions within each section of our anthology entry because we intend to display to readers how our group conducted research, and to convey the inquisitiveness within us as researchers and how our anthology project as a whole questions the traditional female literature canon. 
  
  Our initial questions seek to kick-start our continued research process as we navigate through our findings. The primary and secondary sources that we gathered provide us with more insight into Craik’s identity and the diverse intersectional influences that contributed to the production of this particular work. We think about this research process as a web that continues to grow as sources overlap, lead to one another, and inspire future findings. 

  We want readers to know that our group and other groups within our class do not have all the answers. We will never have them all because we continue to learn and aggregate sources that expand our knowledge and understandings of authors, their texts, and the periods of time in which they lived. There is no stopping place for our research, but that is the beauty of this anthology creation process. We are challenged to ask more questions as we seek answers. As we are learning and questioning and growing through research, we continue to bring new voices to the forefront that have not been included within the traditional literary canon. We connect with other groups in order to inspire more questions about authorship, identity, patriarchal influences, etc. In all of these ways, we continue to inspire more inquiry and critique of the traditional literary canon. We want to question the means and decisions for inclusion of authors and their work in anthologies, and then shape an “anti-anthology” that reshapes and rethinks tradition to bring new voices, identities, and dynamics beyond what readers may be used to or familiar with within a Westernized, white, heterosexual, and male-dominated society.
  
  What to expect next...
  
  In the next three pages, we feature three different chapter selections from the book, including chapters "Self-Dependence," "Female Friendships," and "Growing Old."  We explore the specific themes raised by the titles of these chapters in our analysis in connection to Craik's biography and positionality along with ties to gender critique. 
   

• 1 2020-11-17T13:17:48-08:00 Victorian Home Remedies 24 plain 1036654 2020-12-10T20:25:31-08:00 Within our recipe selections, we chose two home remedies, "To Make Black Medicine" and "Cure for a Cough", because of its inclusion in this manuscript recipe book; we were a bit surprised to find multiple home remedies within this recipe book, so this was something that peaked our interests. We further explored the ways in which medicine was viewed and practiced in nineteenth century England, specifically looking at how alternative medicine was viewed and practiced during this time period. Note also that, although "To Make Black Medicine" denotes the recipe as a medical remedy, the recipe itself and the later inclusion of the same recipe under the name "Black Plaster", as well as research, indicates that this might not have been for internal use, but perhaps as a plaster or paint for linoleum or wood.
  
  For background, the foundations of modern medicine in England were being established during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Although the foundations of modern medicine were being established, there were also many crucial of shifts relating to the ways in which medicine was practiced during this time as well. Medicine before the nineteenth century turned out to be more charity-based (Brown). Medical dispensaries, like Aldersgate Street Dispensary, (which were the equivalent of medical offices today) were established in the eighteenth century. These dispensaries were opened and endorsed by the Royal College of Physicians. Due to the rise of poverty within England during the eighteenth century, specifically in London, these dispensaries began to fill the unmet need of crucial and vital outpatient care for the poor from the overcrowded hospitals (Hartston). With the decline in proper medical care, especially for the poor and vulnerable, an emerging theme that was coming forth concurrently during period in time was the rise in popularity of alternative medicine. To explain this rise further, we will use a popular form of alternative medicine at this time, hydropathy, as an example and case study. 
  
  Hydropathy was a form of alternative medicine that came from "Vincent Priessnitz’s discovery of the healing benefits of pure water and his establishment of Gräfenberg in the Silesian Alps in the mid-1820s as the first and most famous hydropathic center" (Marland and Adams, 500). Further, Priessnitz called his discovery the "negation of orthodox therapy; it was intended to make medicine redundant" (Bradley). Not too long after Priessntiz's discovery, hydropathic treatment centers were started throughout Britain. Despite the rise in these treatment centers, Marland and Adams argue in their article that the domestic practices of hydropathy heavily impacted its popularity in the mid-nineteenth century. 

  "Domestic guides, while validating home treatment, were also likely to publicize the benefits to be gained from attendance at water cure centers" (Marland and Adams 514). 

  With this, domestic practices of these different forms of alternative medicine at this time, like hydropathy, led to their respective rises in popularity during the nineteenth century. Arguably, the inclusion of "A cure for a cough", as well as other recipes such as "A Cure for Rheumatism", which included epsom salt, can speak to the use of alternative medicines and home remedies within the domestic spheres in Victorian England during the nineteenth-century; maybe this was also a reaction to the decline in quality medical care within Britain, with the poor being hardest hit. Further, this may give us a glimpse into figuring out what social class of the anonymous women fell into given the inclusion of these home remedies within this manuscript recipe book. 
  
  Along with hydropathy, there other forms of alternative medicine that we, from a modern-day perspective, may not fully understand or find a bit strange. Opium eating was one of them. In "Cure for a cough," one of the ingredients was in fact laudanum, an opiate that was widely used during this time period and is found in painkillers today. Of course today, we, as a society, are far more cautious about use of addictive drugs, but this was not the case for Victorian England. Most of the opium in the England during the early nineteenth century came from Turkey, accounting for about 80% - 90% of the total imports of the drug into England; Turkish opium had been noted for its strength and high quality (Berridge). Later, Opium usage began to be associated with China (Ng). Further, there were no restrictions on who could legally buy and sell opium in England until 1868. This led to many tragic deaths, like the instance of an infant dying of an overdose of laudanum due to the fact that the infant was mistakenly given syrup of laudanum instead of syrup of rhubarb; the bottles of both the syrup of rhubarb and laudanum were very similar, which ended up being the cause of this unfortunately fatal mistake (Berridge). This example pointed to the larger public health concern of the dangerous nature of such casual, unrestricted, opium use. In her article, "Victorian Opium Eating: Responses to Opiate Use in Nineteenth-Century England," Berridge states: 

   "the first series of figures on opium beginning in the early 1860s showed the full extent of the situation: 126 deaths from opiates in 1863, for instance, out of a total of 403 poisoning fatalities, with 80 deaths in that year and 95 in 1864 from laudanum and syrup of poppies alone. Around a third of all poisoning deaths in the decade were the result of the administration of opiates, and the relatively high accidental, rather than suicidal, death rate from opiates bore witness to the drug's easy availability" (443). 

  Both the recipes for "Cure for a cough" and "To Make Black Medicine," located within this manuscript recipe book, have given us a glimpse into the medicinal world within Victorian England during the nineteenth century, especially highlighting the ways the domestic sphere was heavily involved in different forms of alternative medicine that were happening outside of established medical spaces. It also points to how for a woman, managing a household was far more than cooking and baking, including domestic medicine and crafting.
• 1 2020-11-17T13:06:17-08:00 Cosmopolitanism, National Identity, and Crossing National Lines 15 a discussion on nationalism and cosmopolitanism in relation to cooking plain 1036654 2020-12-10T20:28:48-08:00 Both in the past and now, food and cooking is intrinsically linked to culture and national identity. In Victorian England, good cooking was considered a sign of civility and class, and international cuisines, especially French and German cuisines, were delighted in. This Women's Recipe Book is certainly a sign of that cosmopolitan sense. As mentioned in the introduction to the text, the recipes in the text come from a variety of cultures, though mostly Western European, and include American, Scottish, French, and Spanish-style recipes. One recipe marks itself as "African", and is one of the few distinctly non-European entries in the recipe book. The recipe book's inclusion of recipes from a variety of different national and cultural backgrounds is certainly indicative of Victorian England's cross-cultural contact, and the ways in which it assimilated and communicated with non-English cultures and trade, especially as industrialization became more widespread.
  
  Even as the English began to view themselves in relation to the world as part of a cultural trade, nationalist and racist views grew in popularity. While recipes from other countries became more widespread, the cultural connections to food could also be used to draw lines between 'us' (the English, and some White Western Europeans) and 'them' (the non-Western Other), and this is demonstrated by some of the widely used cooking texts at the time. One of the most famously used cookbooks at the time was Mrs. Beeton's The Book of Household Management, by a woman cook named Isabella Beeton, published in 1861. It was written with the middle-class and housekeeping in mind, and included ways to cook, bake, set a table, clean properly, and more. In chapter 40, "Dinners and Dining", the book touched on the topic of race, culture, and cooking in a way that is recognizably racist. She wrote:

  "Man, it has been said, is a dining animal. Creatures of the inferior races eat and drink; man only dines. It has also been said that he is a cooking animal; but some races eat food without cooking it. A Croat captain said to M. Brillat Savarin, "When, in campaign, we feel hungry, we knock over the first animal we find, cut off a steak, powder it with salt, put it under the saddle, gallop over it for half a mile, and then eat it." Huntsmen in Dauphiny, when out shooting, have been known to kill a bird, pluck it, salt and pepper it, and cook it by carrying it some time in their caps. It is equally true that some races of men do not dine any more than the tiger or the vulture. It is not a dinner at which sits the aboriginal Australian, who gnaws his bone half bare and then flings it behind to his squaw. And the native of Terra-del-Fuego does not dine when he gets his morsel of red clay. Dining is the privilege of civilization. The rank which a people occupy in the grand scale may be measured by their way of taking their meals, as well as by their way of treating their women. The nation which knows how to dine has learnt the leading lesson of progress. It implies both the will and the skill to reduce to order, and surround with idealisms and graces, the more material conditions of human existence; and wherever that will and that skill exist, life cannot be wholly ignoble."

  Isabella Beeton's views on the cultural importance of dining were not uncommon for the era, and the manner in which she dehumanizes other races, using their differing (or rather, imagined) methods of dining as an excuse, was unfortunately also all too common. Victorian England had no problem invading other countries for their ample resources, including food and spices, and this manifested in the idea that the English were capable of using these resources far better than the races she wrote do not 'dine any more than the tiger or the vulture'. This "Orientalism" created a perception of the enlightened, civilized Occident (or West), and the backwards, uncivilized, barbaric Orient (or East), ultimately positing the "European identity as a superior one in comparison with all the non-European peoples and cultures" (Said).
  
  This manifested heavily in the Victorian perceptions of imported ingredients and items, which were often considered healthy or useful, as long as they were not heavily in use by or associated the people of the original culture. Take, for instance, laudanum - or rather, tincture of opium, which appears in this recipe book and was considered a useful curative substance for a variety of medical issues. Opium sale was not regulated in Victorian England until 1868, when only pharmacists were allowed to sell the substance. But, as time went on, opium became more and more associated with foreign production, especially Chinese production:
  

  Eventually, "opium became associated with Chinese opium dens; in particular, white women were thought to be at risk of being corrupted by foreigners", and the ban on opium and laudanum as an addictive substance in 1920 was led by The 1874 Society for the Suppression of the Opium Trade, which was "created specifically to campaign against Britain’s involvement in the opium trade with China" (Ng). While the ban on laudanum usage was entirely justified, the Orientalizing (Said) of the product contributed heavily to its danger in the eyes of the public sphere. The public and political associations between laudanum and a 'foreign' invasive substance heavily contributed to its eventual complete ban, even for medical purposes. 

• 1 2020-11-17T13:19:20-08:00 Laudanum 12 plain 1036674 2020-12-09T23:37:44-08:00

  The Lure of Laudanum, the Victorians' Favorite 

  Laudanum was a real favorite of the Victorian era, used as a cure for everything from coughs (like in this recipe book) and toothaches to rheumatism and insomnia. It was even used to 'quiet' fussy babies. It was made from a tincture of opium- yes, opium- that was readily available in British grocers. Adverts for laudanum at the time demonstrate its wide-spread usage:
  
  
  
  
  
  
  While the painkilling drug was quite addictive, the dangers were not well-known at the time, and only after it became associated heavily with the working class and with Chinese imports, were there heavy pushes to consider it a dangerous substance in England (Ng).
• 1 media/BALANCE DEL ALMA copy.jpg 2020-12-01T10:46:55-08:00 Our Project 10 Introduction to the anthology project and contents plain 1041085 2020-12-03T12:02:18-08:00

  This is a work of feminist literary and rhetorical recovery, an anti-anthology of women writers and writing.

  Produced by Santa Clara University students and faculty in the context of a women’s literature course taught online during a pandemic and an election year, it contributes to the project of studying women’s literature by anthologizing women writers, but it does so while centering questions about what women’s literature is, where it has come from, what it has been, and what it might be, and refusing to resolve these questions.
  
  Having studied the genre of anthologies, particularly anthologies of women writers and scholarship on recovery and gender critique, we call this volume an anti-anthology because we are conscious of the pitfalls of “rescue, recovery, and reinscription” (Kirsch and Royster)—the ways our attempts to include some voices can serve to exclude others. We have asked ourselves:

  How do we study the diverse array of women writers and writing in ways that don’t allow us to slip into essentialism or tokenism? That don’t fall into the same logics and systems that excluded women in the first instance, but instead allow us to continue to question our own assumptions and judgements while reading? That reveal the networks of human and non-human others that have produced the work, and produce our reading and writing in response to it?  That make us--and our embodied experiences as readers, researchers and writers--part of the story? And how do we do this work while knowing, as one student in this course said, that we are destined to fail?

  Facing the seeming paradoxes of feminist recovery head-on, our project was to study women’s writing not by attempting coverage of the “most important” or most deserving or most canonical authors—an impossible feat—but to study the very act of recovery itself, and use our research and writing to produce an volume that works against the centripedal (and ultimately conservative and exclusionary) impulse of anthologization that has long been observed by feminist theorists in rhetorical and literary studies (see Bizzel; Sharer).
  
  We did so by setting boundaries around our work:
  we read and researched only those texts that happen to be held in our own institution’s archives.
    Our constraints were like the formal constraints of poetry: a paradoxically enabling structure that allowed us to ask different questions, seek different answers in our study of women’s literatures.
  
  Focusing on our own archives allowed us to make the politics of the archive a part of our attention. As a historically male college (made coeducational only in 1960) as well as a primarily white and economically privileged institution, our archival holdings have reflected the interests and identities of the institution and its members. We attended to the pervasive whiteness of our (and many other) archival holdings, and our own identities and privileges as well. This is a reality, a material condition that we might be tempted to work around. Instead, making the structural inequity that undergirds all work of literary production, circulation, reception, and preservation part of our work helped to reveal the structures of power and privilege that they represent—structures that have been (and continue to be) crucial to shaping women’s lives and literatures.
  
  With our select authors and texts in hand, we then set out to create a born-digital anthology that might record and extend this process by connecting the work of these authors and of our student authors to readers like you—and to do so in a way that might preserve its own status as a provisional and limited artifact, merely a snapshot of the “story so far” that these women and these students together are telling. To gesture towards this goal, we have provided here a non-linear anthology with multiple pathways for you to explore, each revealing different connections between and among writers, places, times, experiences, identities, and textual forms.
  
  There are likely other connections here that we have not yet considered ourselves, but remain for readers to observe. We hope this supports the project of revealing a literary and rhetorical history (as Sarah Noble Frank put it) not “as such” but “as if”—the enactment of an alternative theoretical approach to feminist recovery in English studies.
  
  As an enacted theory of literary and cultural recovery, we hope that it serves both as a contribution to the work of women’s recovery in literary and cultural history and as a model for how to advance that work in other archives and classrooms, where students might produce alternative anthologies to further elaborate the rich history of women’s literary and rhetorical practice. Your anthology will look different, because your institution is different, your archive is different, and you are different. We hope you will connect your work to ours and to continue to build the network of feminist readers and writers that this work seeks both to represent and to initiate.
• 1 2020-12-07T16:53:16-08:00 Social Class 5 General tag for social class plain 2020-12-08T00:37:07-08:00 Throughout the creation of this anthology, a common theme that we wanted to be aware of -- within ourselves, as writers, the women that we are working to recover, and in our analyses of these women writers-- was privilege. With this, we have viewed social class to be one of those privileges that we have found within our own individual positionalities along with identifying social class as a privilege that was relevant within our selected pieces of texts and/or the positionalities of the women writers featured within this anthology. Social class is a fairly modern concept that was born out of the reorganization of society which was brought about by the industrial movement in England during the 1800s (Ash). With this global shift to capitalism that was catalyzed by England's industrial movement, social class started to become a determining factor for various outcomes of individuals within societies. Over time, this determining factor starts to become noticeable among the factors of race, class, and gender. As the benefits of having a high social class afforded better treatment in society, this has become a privilege that needs to be acknowledged. 

  In thinking about the readings that we discussed throughout the quarter, Francher's text comes to mind in thinking about recognizing and identifying the privilege of different class statuses within our own positionality as writers and within the texts we are analyzing within this anthology. Francher discusses that us, as feminists, need to: 

  "Build our own tools, innovate technologies by and for women, and design interfaces that reflect feminist purposes, we may be able to redraw the power dynamics encoded into our technical landscape. We may be able to find more spaces for diverse bodies, communities, labor practices, and feminist practices"

  
  In order to accomplish what Francher is calling all those in feminist studies and rhetoric studies, we need to be able to recognize privileges like social class, specifically within our analysis of the texts that we are trying to recover in order to create this digital (anti)anthology that does not reproduce the same power dynamics that we are trying to be hyper-aware and critical of. 

• 1 2020-12-05T18:21:16-08:00 Erasure 3 General tag for erasure plain 2020-12-07T17:00:28-08:00 Historically, erasure has been the process of ignoring nondominant groups in relation to race, class, and gender. In this process of ignoring, there is also a sense of "collective indifference that renders certain people and groups invisible" (Sehgal). Further, erasure does not have one form as it can take on multiple forms (i.e. through revisionist history, alienating a nondominant group from society, etc.). It is especially important to note that while forms of erasure can happen to virtually any nondominant group depending on the context of that particular form of erasure, one has to keep in mind the origins of this concept of erasure traces back to naming the treatment of Indigenous people (Hall). Although, throughout this anthology, indigenous erasure will not be the focus of why we use this term, we have to acknowledge where and the context of where this word comes from in order to not create a revisionist history within our anthology that erases the originally meaning of word itself. At the heart of this anthology, we are working to recover women who have been rendered invisible for a multitude of reasons. Through this, erasure is a theme that will be found in several selections within this anthology.